Final Portrait: a character study that doesn’t delve deeply into the nature of friendship and artistic endeavour

Stanley Tucci, “Final Portrait” (2017)

Best seen as a character study and a superficial investigation into an artist’s creativity and what motivates him, “Final Portrait” is noteworthy for its lead actors Geoffrey Rush and Armie Hammer and the zest they both bring to their performances. For those looking for a plot with some excitement, an exhilarating climax and a satisfying resolution, they should look elsewhere: what passes for a plot in “Final Portrait” is Swiss-born Paris resident sculptor / painter Alberto Giacometti (Rush) inviting a friend, ex-spy and writer James Lord (Hammer) to his studio to sit for a portrait which Giacometti claims will just take up two to three hours of Lord’s time. Those two to three hours end up taking over two weeks of Lord’s time as Giacometti fusses over the portrait and keeps erasing, re-doing and re-erasing it. The old fella continually beats himself up over his apparent failure to capture Lord’s inner soul even though he spends a lot of time gazing into the American’s eyes and studying his features. (Someone probably could have told Giacometti that American spies don’t have much in the way of an inner soul.) He also spends a lot of time flirting with prostitute Caroline (Clémence Poésy) which puts him and Lord in danger from her violent pimps. While Giacometti battles with his perfectionism that prevents him from finishing the portrait properly and his chaotic personal life with his long-suffering wife (Sylvie Testud) and Caroline, Lord also spends his time with the painter observing his erratic ways and habits, trying to understand what makes Giacometti tick, and having to keep cancelling his return flight to New York just so he can see how his portrait turns out when Giacometti finishes it – if the old guy can finish it.

Rush’s performance as Giacometti is sharp and energetic if very repetitive as the film trudges on. Hammer’s clean-cut and rather conservative character acts as a perfect foil for the artist’s unconventional and messy ways. Unfortunately the way the film jumps from one day to the next, and then from one collection of days to the next, means that the evolution of the two men’s friendship and respect for each other ends up fragmented and audiences have to assume a great deal about how it progresses. Somehow all the early fighting about how Lord can’t afford to spend extra time sitting for the painting ended up on the cutting-room floor. Giacometti’s relationships with his missus and the mistress don’t make for very substantial sub-plots either; the entry of the pimps late in the film seems like an after-thought to give it much-needed frisson. All the same, the minor characters do a very good job in filling out Giacometti’s support while he agonises over his work and leaves a mess in his wake.

The Paris of the mid-1960s looks very picturesque as does the messy and dusty atelier where Giacometti paints his pictures and reworks his sculptures endlessly (and stashes all his money because he, a Swiss, doesn’t trust banks). The Hollywood stereotyping looks quite thick in parts and some of the music soundtrack is also very twee.

The film’s repetitive structure and resolution parallel the painting’s ongoing creation and eventual completion (of a sort), and just as the painting itself does not capture the perfection Giacometti seeks, so the film also doesn’t completely explain Giacometti’s fascination with Lord as a subject for a portrait or Lord’s interest in Giacometti’s work to the extent that he would willingly sit for nineteen days, sometimes in pain, when he was told he would only have to sit a few hours. The most we see is a lukewarm meeting – it doesn’t come anywhere near to being a clash – of two opposed Western cultures: the jaded, layered and convoluted culture represented by Giacometti and what it values, and the sleek, shiny capitalist culture represented by Lord. While the two men become fast friends, the film gives no indication of what each man really thinks of the other and of the world that he comes from. What does Lord really think of Giacometti’s two-timing and his chaotic home, and what does Giacometti really see in Lord’s sleek style of dress and presentation? Does each man see in the other man something that he lacks and yearns for?

A theme of mortality and staving off death is present: one gets the impression that Giacometti desperately needed to keep painting and re-painting Lord’s portrait to hold physical deterioration and death at bay. If only Tucci had realised that Giacometti’s quest for perfection was his way of holding his personal demons in check, the result could have been a darker and more interesting film.